Ronald Furlong

12:03AM BST 26 Aug 2002

Ronald Furlong , who has died aged 93, was a leading hip replacement surgeon whose reservations about the prostheses used by other orthopaedic surgeons led him to design his own - the Furlong Straight Stem - with which Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was fitted.

Hip replacement surgery was introduced in Britain during the late 1960s by Sir John Charnley. But instead of using Charnley's prostheses Furlong started importing a German variation, the Muller joint, for his patients at St Thomas's Hospital, London. When there were difficulties in importing these, Furlong set up his own company to order and distribute them.

On his retirement from St Thomas's in 1974 Furlong continued in private practice at the Queen Victoria Hospital at East Grinstead, West Sussex. He then set up a second company to organise the production, in Sheffield, both of artificial hips and of the surgical instruments needed to fit them.

The problem with hip replacement shafts is that while they have always been cemented into the thigh bone, they tend to come loose after some years, requiring revision surgery. Cementless prostheses were therefore developed, though it is still unclear if they are better than the cemented ones.

In the 1980s Furlong and Professor Johannes Osborn of Bonn developed a cementless prosthesis that aimed to be totally compatible with bone. This consists of the mineral hydroxy-apatite which is coated on to the shaft of the artificial joint.

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Furlong implanted the first one in a patient in 1985, and published details of the prosthesis in a paper in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery six years later. His apatite-coated prosthesis won a 1993 Queen's Award for Technological Achievement, and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was fitted with an ordinary Furlong Straight Stem in 1995 and again in 1998.

But although these finely-engineered prostheses are undoubtedly excellent, there is little evidence that either type, coated or uncoated, lasts longer than any other leading brand.

The son of a businessman, Ronald John Furlong was born at Woolwich on March 3 1909, and went to Eltham College. He qualified in 1931 at St Thomas's Hospital, where he was to spend much of his working life.

Awarded the Cheselden Medal in Anatomy and Surgery the following year, he quickly established himself as a high-flier; he passed his exams for Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons at 25, and had to wait three years before he could add FRCS to his name.

Furlong was at the Rowley Bristow Hospital in Surrey on the outbreak of war, and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. In the course of being posted to North Africa, Egypt and Italy as Officer in Charge, No 2 General Hospital, he demonstrated a prodigious output; while at Caserta, he planted and documented two hundred broken thigh bones.

His work among the civilian population of Milan, which led to his becoming adept at treating hand injuries, earned him a special blessing by Pope Pius XII. Once, while inspecting a German hospital, he recognised an unusual implant in a German soldier, a Kuntschner nail, which was a device for fixing fractures in the long bones of the arms and legs.

When hostilities ended, the War Department instructed him to seek its origins, which he did by locating a professor hiding in Vienna who directed him to Dr Kuntschner himself in Kiel. Furlong then brought the device to the Millbank Military Hospital in London, which handed it over to a British surgical manufacturer. The result was that it remained in use for more than 50 years.

St Thomas's appointed Furlong to a consultantship without asking him, and sent him to study under the leading orthopaedic surgeons of America and Europe.

A tall, well-built man with striking looks, he was both a fine teacher and a fine performer. One of his students recorded in his diary seeing Furlong back at the hospital in 1946: "As usual, the outpatient department was invaded by the orthopaedic surgeons. We had RF in uniform, back from Italy, to teach us. And although he was as full of mannerisms as them all, he taught well . . .These clinics are more like demonstrations of showmanship than the treatment of patients: in fact, consideration of the latter is a minor detail."

Furlong was one of that generation of larger-than-life hospital consultants, now long gone, who were immortalised in Richard Gordon's novel Doctor in the House. He was passionate, vain and often arrogant, and once he had taken up an idea he would never let it drop. He was fond of quoting Machiavelli's remark that the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions.

He saw people as being either with him or against him; once he threatened to sue a surgical colleague who commented that something he had said was unsupported by evidence.

Furlong also found time to study biomechanics under Professor Friedrich Pauwels at Aachen, Germany, taking German lessons at the Berlitz school in London early each morning.

He subsequently translated Pauwels's books, his atlas of the biomechanics of the normal and diseased hip (1978) and his biomechanics of the locomotor apparatus (1980), as well as Braun and Fischer's On the Centre of Gravity of the Human Body (1986). He was one of the five holders of the Pauwels Medal for Biomechanics.

In 1989 Furlong inaugurated a charity, the Furlong Research Foundation, to evaluate the efficacy of his coated prostheses over the long-term. However, its usefulness is limited since doctors and patients alike need independent research that compares different prostheses.

When the Max Rayne Foundation gave £750,000 to St Thomas's in 1994, and shortly afterwards its founder, Max Rayne, broke a vertebra in a boating accident at Cannes, Furlong was flown out to see him - and proved the ideal for the hospital.

He retained his energy and skills into old age, performing his last operation about five years ago. In his later years Furlong and his wife liked to spend the summer months in Switzerland, where he died of heart failure on August 1 after a short illness.

Ronald Furlong leaves a widow, the former Eileen Watford, who was his third wife.